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kebos

24 karma · joined February 24, 2020

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kebos··on The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership
The Google employee experiment, in my eyes was one to support.

Try treating employees pretty well, encourage a lot of new grass root projects in a supported environment.

No one in Google will be doing anything grassroots now. The end of this experiment is a shame.

For a while it dragged other companies up with it e.g. for top talent you had to go half way towards Google perks.

kebos··on Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy
https://grid.iamkate.com/ - overly good day for renewable production in the UK, my thoughts: 1. Wind is really cost effective for the UK and loads more is due to come online 2. EPR reactors keep running massively over budget e.g. Flamanville 3 3. Research money is heading into the best ways to store grid level energy.

All in all I am very hopeful and not against Nuclear at all but I just can't ignore the charts today.

Such a nice thought that a good % of my flat is being powered with little consequence!

kebos··on The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)
The contracts and indemnity policies drawn up against the contract aren't public things so there is no example I can show.

The leaking of content doesn't matter that much unless it really affects revenues in the scale of the revenues.

It's ironic really. The absolute prevention of leaking content isn't expected. DRM is more like making sure the front door isn't wide open.

kebos··on The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)
DRM is a requirement of the insurance providers who insure distributors and pay out if the distributor leads to the content being leaked.

In reality the DRM technology isn't that important its more akin to the questionnaire you get for car insurance that says do you have a thatcham alarm.

Too much analysis looks at this from technical angle when it's really an insurers tool to lower their risk (only to lower it!).

It's not a big deal when a device/content is compromised merely a policy pays out in the background to the provider to the effect of % lost revenue. All normal insurance ruled apply, payout decided by expert witness, higher premiums for less secure devices etc.

kebos··on Perl Turns 34 Today
Definitely enjoy Perl to this day for how fast you can achieve things with it.

Most of my work goes through evolutions depending on eventual use. Many staying in the first phase.

Proof of concept/one shot work just needed by me: Perl

Needed by internal or external developers who know what they are doing: Python3 rewrite

Needs to be robust: Java/C/C++/Rust

The speed with which you can prototype by piecing together micro C programs mixed with Perl orchestrating them is really something that has benefited me throughout my career!

kebos··on Berlin buys thousands of apartments from corporate landlords
I'll take social housing over the homeless problem you get in countries without large social housing stock 100x.

Maybe some % of people just aren't going to break the cycle. I'd still rather they aren't homeless and causing decay on the streets.

kebos··on A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
This is really cool, it filters out all fluff.

It's not always taking me to totally relevant sites but the results contain my favourite type of content.

Full of writing and pure html - usually the hallmark of someone who knows what they are doing, wants to communicate but doesn't want to waste their time.

kebos··on When will we get secure desktop OSes? (2018)
The article is about sand boxing APIs in the OS. He does mention that app stores are not a solution and gives sound reasons.
kebos··on Fuck You Startup World (2016)
Agreed - when I was working on gpu drivers bit shifting was a daily practice.
kebos··on How Zoom works [slides]
Zoom has great video and audio. I think good echo cancellation, video that copes well with the network, lower latencies - we don't experience that directly but the after effect is you feel subjectively better about the experience.

I think picking each part of the UX apart is secondary to making the key feature work well.

kebos··on A new project: multi-track audio editing (2005)
It's really excellent - I previously used Cubase and Ableton.
kebos··on Math is an insurance policy
I think this article gives AI more credit than it demonstrates at present and simplifies the examples.

It's useful I expect for quick fixes/guidance like the loop example.

For example on improving performance - these days that often needs holistic architectural re-think - surely a creative process? The idea of optimizing involving a loop seems very distant from heterogeneous asynchronous behavior of modern hardware.

If AI really does start to solve in the more 'general' way not just a bit of object recognition here and there, won't software developers incorporate with it as part of process instead. Enabling even more sophisticated software to be written?

I think that is the key part of longevity to software development as a career. The compiler didn't remove the assembly programmer it simply enabled a whole new level of software complexity to be feasible.